On the other hand, there is a hidden message in those lists. Fringe and TW3 were brilliant, Statesman and Donkey weren’t. Both now look remarkably dated and lame. Have I Got News For You? is certainly funny, but it isn’t so much satire as a show about satire. Rory Bremner is brilliant, but predictable; he taps lightly rather than lacerates. Only Morris remains as the bearer of the Swiftian-Cookian flame, and he’s hardly seen. The truth is, we’re not as good at satire as we were, and, if we were, doubtless our leaders would find a way to ban it.
Meanwhile, that American list isn’t quite what it seems. There was something in Lucy, some faint trace of acid that, in Cheers, became a superbly corrosive, almost theological commentary on American individualism. And, years ago, there was the Korean-war comedy M*A*S*H. Early episodes were marvellous cutting and literate lampoons of the military mind-set that was then enmiring the United States ever deeper in Vietnam.
Now, suddenly, American satire is an issue. The Daily Show, a sporadically brilliant late-night news spoof on the Comedy Channel, hosted by Jon Stewart, has become as central to US politics as TW3 was to Britain’s. And there is, of course, Michael Moore, winding up students and the gullible by pretending to know more than he does. “Moore as a rule only conveys enough information to arouse suspicion,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in an astute article in The New York Review of Books, “and not nearly enough to begin to make a case.”
More interesting, and funnier than either of those, however, is the utterly addictive Onion. This is another spoof news operation — it calls itself America’s Finest News Source — best found online at Theonion.com. Started as a student paper at the University of Wisconsin in the 1980s, it is modelled on USA Today, America’s abysmally lowbrow “national” newspaper. Its writers have developed an eerily perfect ear for the mindless chatter that masquerades as news, not just in the United States, but around the world.
“WICHITA, KS. Delivering the central speech of his 10-day ‘Solution for America’ bus campaign tour Monday,” runs the lead in the latest edition, “Democratic presidential nominee Sen John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W Bush from the White House.”
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It was 9/11 that really put The Onion on the map. Impossible to satirise? Not at all. God gave a press conference soon after the act — The Onion’s headline read: “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.” “Which part of ‘Thou shalt not kill’ don’t you understand?” asked God, before storming out in disgust. The paper had previously revealed that God was suffering from bi-polar disorder, “in a diagnosis that helps explain the confusing and contradictory aspects of the cosmos that have baffled philosophers, theologians and other students of the human condition”. The Onion’s news logo for 9/11 showed the scarred New York skyline emblazoned with the words “Holy F****** Shit!”. And in a brilliant generational inversion that captured the whole series of Absolutely Fabulous in one line, The Onion reported on the teen who “gives up pot smoking after seeing parents high”. “DEDHAM, MA. Elyssa Schuster, 16, swore Monday that she will never again experiment with marijuana after coming home to ‘obviously baked’ parents Harold and Judy Saturday night.”
The peculiar genius — I do not use the word lightly — of The Onion is its sense of place. In its brilliantly deranged pages, you can smell America, with its violent, hairy, sentimental truck drivers who break down in tears at a particularly moving country music song that, as a result, has to be banned; with its angry Alzheimer’s sufferers, picketing random buildings in Washington; and in the mindless yet sinister eccentricities of local nutters, always worryingly described as “Area Man” or “Area Woman”.
It is this sense of place that sets The Onion apart from the direct satire of Moore or The Daily Show, who, like TW3 or The New Statesman, are attacking particular issues or opinions. The Onion’s target, by contrast, is everything. It revels in, even celebrates, the diverse insanities of American life. Reading it, one feels immersed in a parallel universe which is, and yet is not, the real United States. Admittedly, this is in part because The Onion does have one subsidiary satirical target — the madness of news coverage — but, in reality, that target is lost in the brilliant lunacy of it all. The Onion is not saying that this or that aspect of the world is wrong, it is saying that life is wrong.
Which brings me back to Turner’s Planet Simpson. His argument is that The Simpsons, and, indeed, Seinfeld, are great American satire. “In the midst of all this,” he writes of the era of Generation X and grunge rock, “satire alone could be safely, unequivocally embraced, because it acknowledged the sanctity of nothing at all. And so satire has triumphed. The Simpsons is the age’s greatest pop institution and it has begotten a whole subgenre of satirical TV.
” Planet Simpson argues that The Simpsons is the true perpetuator of the spirit of rock’n’roll, which, by the 1990s, had become too fragmented to speak with a single voice, as it had done at Woodstock or through the Beatles. Nirvana were, in this context, the owl of Minerva that flew at dusk. Kurt Cobain’s magnificent nihilism only told the young what they had lost after they had lost it. Now nothing mattered. “Oh well,” sang Cobain, “whatever, nevermind.”
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This was shocking to the earnest baby-boomers and their children, because, to them, rock had always been a statement that everything mattered. The Velvet Underground, in this interpretation, were an unfortunate aberration. So, with rock out of the picture, comedy took over. Turner quotes Tony Hendra, a historian of comedy: “Boomer humour had overtaken rock’n’roll as the strongest surviving expression of the generation’s ideas, attitudes, debates and priorities ... Boomer humour was the last remaining mainstream repository of a strongly oppositional counterculture.”
Now, this isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s not enough and it underestimates The Simpsons. There is, of course, no question that this show is a product of the countercultural side of the entertainment industry. “Entertain and subvert” is the motto of its creator, Matt Groening, and one of its most endearing habits is its continual trashing of its own network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. Marge, for example, remarks that Fox turned so gradually into a hard-core porn channel that she hadn’t even noticed.
Yet the first point is that this counter-culture is older and more varied than Woodstock and rock’n’roll. It goes back to the European émigrés who took over Hollywood in the 1930s and made dark, psychotic films noirs, as well as to Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain, both of whom specialised in taking the most serious things as lightly as possible.
The second point is that satire in The Simpsons, as in The Onion, is not so much the content of the show as the water in which it swims. In The Onion, the absurdities of newspapers are used as a springboard into the higher absurdities of American life in particular and of life in general. Equally, in The Simpsons, the town of Springfield is riddled with quite fantastic levels of corruption. Mayor Quimby, Police Chief Wiggum, Mr Burns and Moe the bar-owner are, uniformly, scum: two-bit con men who happen to run the place. They are used to satirise specific real-world abuses: police brutality, conscienceless big business, pork-barrel politics and so on.
Yet none of this actually works as satire, because there is no suggestion things could be made better. Mayor Quimby is not a bad mayor, he’s just what mayors are on Planet Simpson. Idealistic Lisa fails hopelessly when she tries to improve things, and even the few good impulses of punk Bart invariably backfire. The Simpsons defend themselves with love for each other because this is the only defence. Homer, the greatest comic creation of our time, understands this. “I understand, honey,” he says to Lisa. “I used to believe in things when I was a kid.”
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Not to believe in things is the only response to a world that is inevitably, irredeemably and pervasively corrupt. Homer is the boomer who lost his faith, even in rock’n’roll, though rock still, like so many things in his wonderful life, provides a kind of backhanded consolation. In one episode, he tells Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins: “You know, my kids think you’re the greatest. And, thanks to your gloomy music, they’ve finally stopped dreaming of a future I can’t possibly provide.”
It is perhaps Seinfeld that Turner gets the most wrong. Again, like The Onion, this is a work constructed out of a satirical fabric — in this case, the target is the sitcom. But, again, the real subject of the show is its own emptiness, an emptiness taken to delirious heights in Curb Your Enthusiasm, a follow-up series in which Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, follows his own non-adventures. This is closer to Cobain’s “nevermind” than it is to Woodstock; and, countercultural though it is, satire it certainly isn’t.
Unless, of course, life as a whole is a legitimate satirical target. For, in the end, the true target of all these wonderful works — they will prove to be among the most enduring artistic creations of our time — is life. How on earth do we get by, living, as we do, amid the exhausted projects of modernity? The Simpsons’ answer is the same as Auden’s: we must love one another or die. The Seinfeld answer is to focus on trivia and hope for a few good laughs along the way; The Onion’s is to sink into the madness.
However, you can’t really satirise life, because there is no norm by which it can be judged, no perspective from which it can be seen. It’s all we have, it’s where we live. You can’t make life better by laughing at it, you can only make it more bearable. These shows aren’t satire; they are, in the highest sense of the word, consolations.
So, maybe we can claim that we still do satire better than the Americans — or we would if somebody had the sense to hand prime time over to Chris Morris, the one weapon of mass destruction we have and they don’t. Unfortunately, they do something much better. They trash life as it has become, the one true corrupter.
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Planet Simpson by Chris Turner is published by Ebury Press. The first three series of Seinfeld will be available on DVD in October